change the pear vol. 20 28 Dec 2023

hello loves. here we are at the end of the year. it feels impossible to write any kind of summary of [gestures broadly] whatever the fuck that was, so instead i want to take this moment to say: thank you for reading this newsletter, for keeping me company through 2023. i wish you love, light, and so many moments of joy in the year to come. and as always: free palestine.

on repeat

dreamy day by ATEEZ. ATEEZ came back with a new album on december 1st ready to save me from seasonal depression and it, as per usual, slaps. i woke up at 5am to watch the music video with zoë and listen to the seonghwa & hongjoong unit song (NO further comment on this.) and promptly passed out again, only to wake up to 100+ messages from zoë as they listened to the album, which i immediately returned as i did a listen of my own. when i got to dreamy day, i said within the first 30 seconds:

I LOVE THIS :)
this is miriam coded
MY HANDS ARE IN THE AIRRRRRRR
I LOVE THIS :)
I LOVE THIS!!! :)

what more can i say! it’s a song to lift the spirit! whoah-oh-oh, sing it all together! i love boyband music! unapologetically and with my full heart!

modern girl by bleachers. sorry but jack antonoff knows what he’s doing. i love this euphoric stomping 80s dance saxophone HIT!!

the box by johnny flynn. while on the way to avebury, i only wanted to listen to johnny flynn and this was the sole song of his i had downloaded on my phone. i played it over and over again. i think it’s the perfect song for the dying days at the end of the year. leave my body, leave my bones / leave me whole and leave my soul / leave me nothing, i don’t need at all.

last seen

elete, lee and i took a winter solstice trip to avebury, home of britain’s largest stone circle, built over 4000 years ago. it’s a huge dirt bank (a henge) enclosing large standing stones in a ring, with two smaller rings inside. some of the stones are gone, but what remains is astonishing. they are all different, weathered and eroded into shapes, some smooth, some rough, some with cavities and holes in. there’s something irresistible about them: as soon as we walked up to the first stones we reached out to touch, to hold, to rest against them. we walked up on the bank and had lunch (soup from a thermos for me!) and then wandered around the rest of the circle. after that we walked along a little, fast-flowing river, across muddy fields, bare and bleak, under a dramatic sky to silbury hill, a giant man-made construction of dirt and chalk. nobody knows why silbury hill was built, or what its purpose was. as we crossed the field to reach it, we noticed a moat of water around it (lee: “next time, we bring a boat!”) and it felt as though we were on a mythical quest.

i love neolithic sites. there is something so powerful and magical about them, a place that has held significance for thousands upon thousands of years, even as their original meaning and use has faded from memory. i love how we can understand a small part of the purpose of a site, especially their alignments with sun/moonrise and the seasonal shifts, even as the bigger picture eludes our grasp. these circles and earthworks exist in a place so far outside of our understanding, and yet something about them still compels us, moves us when we set foot in these ancient sacred places.

reading

if you’ve spoken to me about books over the last couple of weeks, you’ll have heard my rant about my work by olga ravn. the blurb states that it is “a novel about the unique and fundamental experience of motherhood… [exploring] the thorny, twisted ties between pregnancy, maternity, capitalism, work, art, individuality, and literature”. this immediately set alarm bells ringing in my mind. anything that claims to be both unique & fundamental AND look at the links between maternity and capitalism/work had better get it right. i liked olga ravn’s previous novella, the employees, so much that i thought, okay, let’s give this one a go.

i should have listened to my misgivings! this was 400 pages of tedious drivel and some of the worst poetry i’ve ever read in my life, with nothing insightful or interesting to say about postnatal depression, the work of motherhood or relations between men and women as parents. it reads as one long complaint about how hard things were for the narrator. i don’t mean to sound callous. i know motherhood is hard, and i know that postpartum depression is a serious illness. my problem was that there was no movement in the book, no progress from one state to another, no development for our narrator. she sits there, complains about giving birth, complains about pregnancy, complains about writing while being a mother, complains about her husband, who can do nothing right—he’s either being too overbearing and trying to be the child’s second mother, or he’s an absent father and a bastard. and that’s supposed to be radical? sorry, but miss me with this. also where were the actual links to politics and political economy? as far as i could tell there was only a brief mention of how the family doesn’t have much money, plus one line misreading marx completely. not to be a bitch but if you have capitalism on the back cover and the book is called My Work, you have to do a little better than that. if you are going to write a book on motherhood and pregnancy and patriarchy in 2023, you need to do a bit of analysis, a bit of digging into why things are the way they are, and what we can do to change it. the endless stasis of the narrator pissed me off!

even worse was the ridiculous section where she starts analysing other works of literature that deal with madness and postnatal depression, citing hiromi ito’s “killing kanoko” as a revolutionary example of defiance. for context, this is a poem about killing a baby called kanoko—the name of hiromi ito’s real life daughter. i have not read it but my brief google showed me the first few lines and they were not nice. in my work, the narrator says “it’s ridiculous how people think the narrator of ito’s poem is wholly identifiable as her and that she would think about doing harm to her child”. can i stress, the name of ito’s child in real life is kanoko. what the fuck, guys! why is talking openly about wanting to murder your child being portrayed as some sort of heroic feminist act? am i going insane?

final thing: the number of times the narrator asserted “bad poems are okay” or “writing is allowed to be bad” or “i’m writing a bad book but i don’t care” actually had me laughing by the end. girl… you said it not me….

free palestine

letter from gaza by ghassan kanafani

misreading palestine by max ajl

Fifth, through these achievements, the Palestinian resistance has been able to present an acute threat to the settler-capitalist property structures called Israel, to militarized accumulation, to the world’s workshop for counterinsurgency technology, and to the entire architecture of regional repression with its associated petrodollar flows, treasury and security purchases, and arms merchandising. For capitalism is not just the smooth clockwork of accumulation through generalized commodity exchange and labor exploitation, it is the machinery of violence – its technology – which ensures the smooth running of the clock, the thingification of its human elements, the political decisions to maintain and rework the machinery of monopoly accumulation, and the waste of human lives which is increasingly the core Arab input into global capitalism.

no side to fall in: medical neutrality in gaza by mary turfah

Tending—the very act of doctoring—amounts to siding, and Palestinian doctors are killed irrespective of the culpability they’re willing to articulate precisely because to act as a doctor in the face of an exterminatory project is a political act, a presentation of oneself and all the resources they’ve accumulated over decades as a final barrier against death. This, against an occupier committed to necropolitics—total control over the who and when and how of life and death, along with what happens to their bodies after. Through this lens, of course the doctor is a threat.

anti-zionism as decolonisation by leila shomali and lara kilani

scrolling through genocide by steve salaita

a race against time: the life and death of ghassan kanafani by louis allday

gas, gaza and western imperialism by tara alami

miscellaneous

palestinian food with hana. making aubergine donburi with marisa when she came to stay. long conversations on my sofa. travelling together to leaflet a wandsworth mosque and the kindness of people there. watching my mum on the megaphone at a protest. the joy and chaos of christmas day dinner (the official one with alex, lydia, saskia and dorothy obviously). sending out for espresso martini ingredients midway through the meal. singing carols and dancing to christmas music. the caption of this picture of boygenius. this embroidered artwork. this ursula k. le guin quote. this louise glück poem. wandering stoke newington with hana. jun’s beautiful, delicious vegan chocolate tart. a long conversation with jun and nandini about vulnerability and relation. chloe’s birthday brunch. hanging out with tim at climbing. poems on communication with agnes. rearranging my room with hana’s help. millie’s new baby wearing saskia’s knitwear. herbal cocktails. finishing one fanfiction with zoë and sharing our incredibly long, sincere author’s notes that were the same thing said in slightly different wording. drunk, earnest conversations over orange wine with claire. siyang seeing a picture of me, my mum and my grandma and crying. getting packages from overseas friends. doing our annual christmas gift exchange with hareem. alex and lydia’s christmas drinks. introducing hana to mulled wine. 2024 moodboard (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

see you next year. all my love.